In my earlier post, I talked about how there was an issue of small block sizes leading to an off-chain, possibly fiat or fractional reserve Bitcoin environment. Now that I've thought about the issues more, I'm not quite sure raising the TPS to Gavin's intended levels does anything to solve that. I would like to hear other people's thoughts on this aspect of block sizes. If his "fix" does nothing to solve this possible problem in the future of Bitcoin, why even bother raising it if we're going into an off-chain environment anyway?
The only purpose in raising it would be if he forsees a failure of block reward subsidy to secure the network. If the marginal TPS upgrade isn't enough to stop an off-chain environment, the block reward subsidy problem will still exist unless Bitcoin is run as a non-profit utility by some random organizations, payment processors, or governments. Overall, it's a very complex scenario that requires people to make assumptions about future transaction levels, both on and off-chain...
Las time we started to butt up against the block size limit, it only required a 'soft' fork to change the block size. If we start to butt up against it this time it takes a 'hard' fork to change the block size. (my understanding at least).
As it requires a hard fork, its probably wise to get that sorted *before* we start butting up against the limit.
I'd agree it only buys time though. Better to have more time than less.
Testing with 20mb blocks might not mean that we go straight to 20mb blocks, it might be that the hard fork implements the 20mb as the hard limit, but we only go to 2 or 5 meg blocks with a soft cap (like it used to be before 1mb blocks). Just speculatin'
I don't know if the outcome will be net good or bad, but I think the intention (buy time) is good.